Pruning is still finished…

Yes. It’s done. Do you see that big grin on our faces. Thanks to the hundreds of volunteers who pruned over 9000 trees. Thanks to all who raked and brought their children. Thanks to all who took the time to work in the orchard and give of themselves. We are finished with the pruning. The orchard looks good this year. The efforts of everyone last year and this year have certainly paid off. The trees look good, the rows between the trees are wider. The service missionaries replaced the old irrigation system. Roads are leveled out and the ruts are filled in. It’s been a good year plus. We have been blessed and we hope you feel blessed.

So the next few weeks before thinning starts, the orchard will be spraying, fertilizing, and putting out pheromone bands. All to help produce a good yield. So enjoy the month. We hope to see you soon.

The service missionaries.

Pruning is finished.

We finished pruning Wednesday evening. There is no need to show up Thursday to prune,

One last push to finish pruning…

The following was sent to all the stake leaders last Saturday…

From Bruce to the leaders

Sent to your Stake Leaders

Stake Leaders,  we will need a large pruning on Wednesday April 2 and Thursday April 3 of this coming week.  We are not working on Tuesday because of possible weather conditions.  Please encourage your membership to get as large a group as they can out on these days.  If we can get a big turnout we could finish early.  Please help us finish before conference weekend.  Thanks Bruce

Changes are being made…

This is a long read. But I feel it’s needed so everyone understands why we are doing, or trying to do things differently.

In the past month the orchard has moved to take records from paper to digital. Everyone is feeling the change and everyone has their thoughts about it all. Today, after reviewing what has been done, and what needs to be done, and taking into account many suggestions for improvements, we are making some additional changes to the forms and processes.

If you don’t want to read more, here are the changes.

• First, the ‘Sign Up’ form has changed by removing the safety requirement section. These are being moved to the ‘Check In’ form.

• Second, a new ‘Sign Up’ form has been created for people who are entering multiple entries and was primarily designed for those helping others to sign in. It’s not exactly what I would like to see, but limitations of the web building application prevent me from doing more. This may change in the future.

• Third, the ‘Check In’ form is being disabled from direct access at this time, and those who have ‘Signed Up’ will be sent a text with link to the ‘Check In’ form. (Yep, I can’t get rid of it due to reasons I mention below.)

• There are other changes that probably won’t be visible to you as a volunteer.

Now onto the long winded stuff….

As background the orchard must meet several legal requirements. These come from

• the IRS (they want to know who is working at the orchard and how many hours are being donated.)

• the FDA who wants to make sure we are doing what is required to keep volunteers safe

• the Church who wants to make sure we meet all legal requirements.

These are not optional. So to meet these requirements we try to design the user forms and datasets to comply with these. We also try to make the forms as easy to use as possible.

There are two datasets. One is the ‘Sign Up’ form which allows us to know how many have signed up for any day. The second is the dataset that contains all the legal stuff we need to have when audited. And we do get audited. This data set is the ‘Check In’ form. What has to be in this data set is the persons name, date served, and acknowledgment they have watched the safety videos. In the past we have used paper forms to do this, and a signature was needed.

Those requirements are still valid. But in place of a signature, the use of an electronic form submission is suitable for audit purposes. I was hoping to replace the ‘Check In’ form as we have been doing this last week. However, the powers that be are more comfortable with the actual volunteer filling out the form and submitting it.

Finally because it is so much faster and easier to audit digitally, the orchard is moving to having all documents in a digital system.

If you have thoughts, suggestions, questions, or improvements, please volunteer at the orchard and see me. I’m usually doing the parking.

The Weather is Good, Let’s Prune!

Thanks to so many of you who are using the Web site to sign up online. It makes scheduling and deciding what to do so much easier when we have a clear idea of how many people to expect.

Beginning tomorrow, Tuesday March 25th, the crew checking in volunteers will be using the QR codes to check you in. Here’s how it all works. When you sign up, a QR code is generated for you and you only. This QR code is placed in a file along with your name, stake, ward, and service date. This file is printed out and we will use it as you enter. The orchard missionary checking you in will ask for your name, find it on the sheet, and scan the QR code next to your name. That QR code goes to the data set that is used to ‘Check In’. Thus making the check in step unnecessary.

The back end data sheets are capable of detecting duplicate entries. So if anyone does ‘check in’ using the web site, and also gets ‘checked in’ at the orchard, only 1 record is added to the database. This is important because it is this data that is used to record hours.

The ‘Sign Up’ data is used both to help us schedule as well as a legal record. The FDA audits these records to ensure the orchard is complying with all safety requirements.